Cognitive dissonance occurs when someone holds conflicting beliefs, or that person's beliefs conflict with their behavior. The mind doesn't like this, it feels wrong. Often, the mind will try to patch dissonances with lies, half-truths, denials, or rationalizations.
For Example:
Person X loves animals and feels that treating them cruelly is wrong
Person X also loves a good chicken sandwich
Person X finds out that most chicken comes from brutal industrial farms
Person X sees that an animal lover wouldn't torture, murder, and eat an animal
Person X is in a state of cognitive dissonance. How can
they love animals and also torture and eat them? It does not make sense. People don't like this. It makes them feel bad.
Now person X has choices:
a) Stop eating chicken (but the sandwich is so good!)
b) Only eat chicken that is grown and harvested humanely (difficult to do)
c) Admit, "I am a bad person," and eat the sandwich (people don't like this)
d) Make up a lie, patching the cognitive dissonance (the easy choice)
If the person chooses "d" here are some frequently chosen lies that would cover this dissonance:
Animals don't hurt like humans do, so hurting and killing them is not really cruelty.
Chickens aren't the same as the animals I love, so this is okay; it's not like I am eating a puppy, right?
The chicken in my sandwich somehow avoided suffering and died quickly, so it's okay.
I don't eat chicken very often, so it doesn't really count.
Last thing:
Some people may now be wondering, "What's the problem. Everybody eats chicken, right?"
To them I say, "Yes, many millions of people eat chicken," so let's try another example.
What if we replace chickens with people? Now, thank goodness, most of us don't eat people, but we do abuse, exploit, conquer, bomb, torture, and enslave them.
But those things are horrible, so let's try an easy one.
Have you ever seen a homeless person who was clearly sick or starving and, when the person asked you for money to buy food, thought to yourself, "I am not going to give him any money; he will probably just spend it on drugs."
If so, you have fallen back on a common rationalization that people often use to patch cognitive dissonance:
You believe yourself to be a good person.
You are, apparently, allowing another person to starve.
You know a good person wouldn't let another person starve right in front of them.
--- Cognitive Dissonance Occurs Here ---
You think: This person will spend my money on drugs (here is the lie).
No money = No drugs = You actually helped the person by not giving them money.
If, like me, you are thinking to yourself, "Yeah but..." while filling in another story and getting nervous or angry, you are feeling cognitive dissonance. How will we patch it?
Personally, I just give the person a dollar, if I have any cash on me, and lie to myself that it's enough to really help. It makes me sick inside, but I don't know what else to do.
Works Referenced:
Cherry, Kendra. "What is Cognitive Dissonance." VeryWellMind. The DotDash Publishing Family, 13 Mar. 2019. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-cognitive-dissonance-2795012. 26 Mar. 2019.
Singer, Peter. "The Singer Solution to World Poverty. The New York Times Magazine. The New York Times Company, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/05/magazine/the-singer-solution-to-world-poverty.html. 25 Mar. 2019.
